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The End of Firefox Windows XP Support

At the same time, on the Extended Support Release channel, we released Firefox ESR 60.2 and stopped supporting Firefox ESR 52: the final version of Firefox with Windows XP support.

Now, we don’t publish all-channel user proportions grouped by operating system, but as part of the Firefox Public Data Reportwe do have data from the release channel back before we switched our XP users to the ESR channel. At the end of February 2016, XP users made up 12% of release Firefox. By the end of February 2017, XP users made up 8% of release Firefox.

If this trend continued without much change after we switched XP users to ESR, XP Firefox users would presently amount to about 2% of release users.

That’s millions of users we kept safe on the Internet despite running a nearly-17-year-old operating system whose last patch was over 4 years ago. That’s a year and a half of extra support for users who probably don’t feel they have much ability to protect themselves online.

It required effort, and it required devoting resources to supporting XP well after Microsoft stopped doing so. It meant we couldn’t do other things, since we were busy with XP.

I think we did a good thing for these users. I think we did the right thing for these users. And now we’re wishing these users the very best of luck.

…and that they please oh please upgrade so we can go on protecting them into the future.